Recently thought my Twitter account was hacked but in fact it was a stupid issue with me adding a Third Party Application to my account and not reading the requirements it wants for my account and authorizing it.

Before the Third Party Application is installed to your Twitter account it asks you for authorization that you are allowing this App access to you Twitter and also listing what the App requires.

This should be carefully reviewed prior to acceptance as some of the requirements may want access to you mail, either too read or write (Send mail & read mail) on your behalf.

Definition:A third-party application is a product developed apart from Twitter.com or Twitter’s official mobile apps, and that is used to access Tweets and other Twitter data. Seesmic, Hootsuite, and Twitter’s Facebook application are all third-party apps.

When I seen some unusual tweets been posted to my account 1st thing I thought was that my account was compromised. In fact it was not hacked as there was no malicious activity carried out within my account.

Also mails were sent to 3 of my followers advertising loosing body fat in 2 weeks.

It seems the only damage carried out within this experience was it could possibly get me in trouble with some of my friends by saying they need these diet pills. 🙂 😛

Twiiter’s Quick Response

Twitter actually picked up on this very quickly and mailed me to perform a password reset thinking my account was compromised which is good. Not sure how but it must have noticed the malicious looking mails sent to my followers or the quick succession of random tweets posted from my account.

What to do Next

Review the applications you’ve connected in the Apps tab of your account settings.